Investment Requires The Patience Of Fishermen.

A clever fisherman does not spread a net. He only studies where the fish will most likely hook up, and then slowly wait. The oak value fund, headquartered in North Carolina, manages $68 million of assets. Coates, the manager of the fund, believes that for fishing purposes, it is more important to choose the right waters, and then you can catch the fish you want.

The same applies to his investment methods. He adopts typical values. Investment Method and apply it in reverse direction. They use value analysis tools to test all the companies, then screen them, find out the companies they like to have, and reexamine them. company The value of these transactions and their trading prices with margin of safety.

It sounds like a waste of time, but it does need patience with fishermen. Coates and his partners spent a lot of effort in 2004 and 2005 to evaluate thousands of companies and find out what they call "investment areas". After years of research and interviews, they have clearly identified companies that can be worth having.

This investment strategy has been successful, and oak value fund has risen 19% this year, 4 percentage points higher than its large balanced fund of the same nature. The oak value fund is in the top 5% position in the one-year and three year fund rankings. The real investment of the fund is the investment company itself, not the company valuation and stock price.

This strategy means the same one. shares There will be many buying and selling times, for example, the Apollo group, the educational giant they have invested in, has been bought three times. This also means waiting for many years to buy a dream stock with a good opportunity, such as the Monsanto company they invested in.

Coates believes that the Apollo group is, in a sense, anti cyclical. When people's careers are in transition, they want to improve their chances through learning. The number of trainees of Apollo group education group is 22.5% higher than that of last year, and the company's revenue has increased by 26%. The share price has risen from $58 of Coates bought in May to 64 dollars now.

Avon Products is another stock owned by Oak Value Fund in the past 15 years. Recently, its investment in the fund has changed from small holdings to the top five investment stocks. Coates believes that the value of Avon Products before was mainly in its sales mode, but now it has the corresponding brand value. The company's current stock price is $32, up 34% from the beginning of the year, and the oak value fund bought at a price of $21 last October. {page_break}

The new member of the oak fund investment target this year is Monsanto, an agribusiness giant. The company is no stranger to the oak Value Fund. Coates has always wanted to buy this stock, but its share price has always been expensive. Coates is impressed by the company's herbicide business and is optimistic about the company's seed business. He has come to the conclusion that Monsanto's earnings are misinterpreted as a result of a one-off rise in share prices.

In June this year, when the average manufacturer increased production, Coates discovered the inflection point of the company's share price, buying at $75 per share, far below the $145 a share in 2008. The stock price is now above $82, and the company's expected price earnings ratio is about 19 times.

Coates explained that he did not expect to find the lows of the stock correctly. He invested more in consideration of the business value of the investment company.

Oak value fund has not always been so impressive in the past ten years. It often lags behind its peers. It avoids cyclical industries, such as energy and commodities, which have been very strong in those ten years. Then Carle, the founder of the fund, decided to change. He thought the oak Value Fund's way of doing things needs to be changed, especially to expand the scope of the fund tracking company. Although the fund did not perform well from 2002 to 2005, its performance ranked the first quarter of its peers in the ten year period.